Did the Amazon loop last quarter. Here's what actually mattered.

corp_refugee · 4 replies

Interviewed for a senior SWE role on a Prime Video adjacent team. Five rounds, fully virtual, spread over two days.

Coding was LeetCode medium-hard, nothing exotic. Two graph problems, one DP. I'd done maybe 80 problems in prep and it was enough. That wasn't the hard part.

The hard part was the LP portion, and I didn't take it seriously enough going in. The bar raiser round was 40 minutes of behavioral with exactly one coding question tacked on at the end. She was methodical. 'Walk me through the most complex cross-team conflict you've navigated.' Then: 'What did you actually say to that engineer? What was the exact response?' They want receipts, not summaries.

My advice: write out 8-10 actual stories from your career before you go in. Full STAR format, real dates, real numbers where possible. The LPs they hit me on: Ownership, Disagree and Commit, Have Backbone, Deliver Results, and something in the Invent and Simplify bucket. I got the offer but the process is genuinely exhausting in a way that FAANG interviews didn't used to be.

Also: the recruiter timeline was slower than I expected. Phone screen to offer letter was about 6 weeks total.

4 replies

newgrad_neil

the bar raiser thing is terrifying to me. so this person has veto power regardless of what the team thinks?

corp_refugee

effectively yes. the bar raiser can block a hire even if every team interviewer wants to move forward. it's actually one of the more interesting structural choices amazon made, you can debate whether it works but the intent is to prevent individual teams from lowering the bar when they're desperate. whether that intent survives contact with reality is a separate question.

tired_recruiter

6 weeks is on the faster end honestly. i've seen Amazon loops drag to 10-12 weeks with no explanation. if your recruiter goes quiet after the loop just send a short check-in email every 5 business days. they're not ghosting you, they're just buried.

staff_steph

the 'write out real stories with real dates' advice is underrated. most people go in with vibes. amazon interviewers literally take structured notes and the debrief format requires them to quote what you said. vague = no evidence = no hire. specificity is your only weapon.